


Dragon's Breath

by PrettyMissKitty



Category: DBSK | Tohoshinki | TVfXQ | TVXQ, JYJ (Band), K-pop, Original Work
Genre: Altered Mental States, Confused Timeline, Ex-Soldier, Flashbacks, Gen, Military, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Therapy, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 19:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13642614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyMissKitty/pseuds/PrettyMissKitty
Summary: Recently retired from active service after a traumatic mission in the mysterious, magical jungles of South East Asia, Jae is a special operations officer undergoing mandatory therapy / extended psychiatric debrief as he re-acclimates to civilian life.Haunted by the echoes of that jungle, and plagued by hallucinations of a girl who might not even exist, Jae struggles to understand what's Real as he attempts to define himself and his new place in the world.





	Dragon's Breath

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a CF JaeJoong did WAY BACK WHEN... like summer 2010 or something. I can't even find it anymore, but I'm pretty sure it was for Cartier...

 

{Ḍrāgana nā Dama} ড্রাগন না দম

 

 

Glass.

An entirely clear solid composed of a sister to life’s most basic element.

Clear. Solid. Life.

It was exactly what he needed when he made the transition.

Between months, or years.

Or decades, of being a soldier and being a citizen.

Glass held none of the subterfuge of Action.

None of the flimsy yes-no answers that marked out what constituted a steady reply.

 

 

Surrounding himself with glass after returning from a mission made the line between human and hell-raiser almost visible. Made the soft sensation of cold skin brushing across his chest as arms looped around his neck harder to ignore.

> _Find me, Hero._

Focusing on the sound of his breathing, he kept his eyes closed. Trying to remember what being human felt like as his fingers twitched in silent panic upon the realization that there was no gun within his grasp.

> _We are old souls, made cruelly young._

Toes curling as his eyes fluttered, he felt his breathing deepen. Not in controlled and steadied pacing, but in the desperation of desire. Sheer need for more oxygen as the water pressed in and rekindled the terrors of claustrophobia.

> _Remember who you are, Hero. What you are, what you’ve chosen to be._

The panic welling up inside of him was unbearable now, his chest constricting beneath the cool coils of invisible arms. For another moment he tried to stamp it down, to resist the urgings of his drills and training. His fingernails scraped against the enamel of the bathtub. Warm water spilled out, sloshing gracelessly to the tiled floor as his legs protested to his attempt to maintain stillness.

> _Remember who you are, Hero. Remember you, and remember me._

Giving up, he leapt from the water. Skidding along the slippery floor, he made his way to the work desk he kept enclosed behind doors and locks. The only entirely opaque walls in his house in the country. His breath made his body shudder as it came in gasps. His hands quickly found the piece of metal and plastic that was an extension of his being while on a mission. In his capable hands, the SIG Sauer P229R DAK was disassembled and reassembled over and over again. Each cycle took less than a minute.

> _I need you, Hero. I need you to remember._

Meanwhile, the running water in the bathroom reached the edge of the tub and began to spill over as the owner worked maniacally away in his own little world. A single gold feather drifted across the surface, catching on the edge rather than falling to the floor. The tumble of water into the pool ceased.

> _I need you. Find me._

The ghosting echoes of an almost remembered dream brushed across his cheek. Slowly, the repetition of building and rebuilding his firearm allowed his heart rate to slow, his breathing to be checked. Eventually, he felt almost alive again.

He gave a shuddering sigh. Staggering to his feet, the gun heavy in his hand, he made his way to the bedroom. Pulling on a pair of sweats, he tucked the firearm into the waistband. Three weeks wasn’t quite enough.

Then he went back to the bathroom to clean up. Towels soaked up the water on the floor. The drain was pulled to let the pool flood away. The feather, a plucked curiosity that swirled his thoughts away into the fictitious silence of white noise, twirled senselessly in his fingers. Obsessively.

                        Tangible.

 

* * *

 

He was led into the standard debriefing room as he was every morning, grumbling. Jason Tang, as he was officially delineated by the government of the country he most preferred to name himself a citizen of, disliked debriefing. Even as he logically knew that it would be best to work through the psychological issues in controlled circumstances, emotionally, he liked to keep certain aspects private.

He crashed down on the couch and kicked his feet up over the arm as he crossed his hands behind his head. His combat boot twitched in an uneasy rendering of relaxation as he waited for the doctor to get the tape rolling and settle himself with his notes.

His first comment was on the feathers.

There were three of them now.

Fastened neatly into a makeshift cache that had been attached to a chain.

It hadn’t left Jason’s neck once since he’d fashioned the trinket with the first feather, his dog tags, and a bit of spare wire. The one thing he had brought back with him from the middle of nowhere had been a simple golden feather.

Their meaning, origins even, hadn’t yet been made clear.

These sessions were slow going. Three and a half weeks of daily sessions. Each was only three hours long, to reduce the strain on the subject’s humanity as they recounted the details of the mission. For a mission like this one, it usually took a month of pure retelling before the psychological issues themselves came to light, the problems of dealing with the difference between _there_ and _here_.

Rationalizing the execution of immoral acts with the intent and result of protecting something greater.

Dr. Peterson was making quick progress with Jason.

Either this was a good sign, that the events hadn’t scarred his unconsciousness beyond what he could recognize, or one that signaled terrible things, that Jason was getting used to his other life. Dr. Peterson was hoping for the first option. Only three people had died in direct correlation to Jason’s actions this time around, and millions had been saved.

What seemed to have most taken a toll on the young black-ops soldier was the isolation. In normal circumstances, he’d have had team, or at least some link to another human being. But for this mission he’d been sent off into the jungle alone. Killing alone, living alone. He’d had to protect himself from enemy soldiers and wild animals, eliminate the targets and dispose of the evidence, and navigate through a land that even time rarely dared to tread. Alone.

“You should think about buying a cat.”

The same advice as always.

The same blasé reply as always.

“I’m allergic.”

 

* * *

 

Green.

Emerald green.

> He remembered.

Green had been everywhere.

Wide leaves and broad arrays of foliage. Vines draped over the yellowing moss that clung to ancient stone.

 _Green_ had been everywhere.

But not _that_ green.

That intelligent, emerald green.

 _That_ had been special.

> _That_ he remembered.

Those bright green eyes.  


* * *

 

 

He named the cat Mouse.

It was a smoky, brown grey kitten that had gotten the tips of both of its ears torn off somehow. The rounded, fluffy stubs looked like mouse ears. And the irony of hunter and hunted amused him.

He hadn’t bought the cat, hadn’t even invited it in.

It had come through an open window, seeking shelter from the rain.

He found it when he went to investigate the dripping of water that was echoing though the ducts of his heating system. Rain was rolling in sheets though the window that wasn’t supposed to open.

The cat had been nearby. Amusing itself with a feather that lifted up on imagined drafts in the still air. He hadn’t made it leave.

The cat didn’t become Mouse until a week after it had moved in.

He had found it nosing about looking for food when he’d noticed the ears and had called its attention through what was at first a derogative nickname as he passed it some oatmeal. He was done with breakfast anyway.

At Peterson’s prodding he got the cat a collar, along with the other accessories the average house cat needed. Having his own little room, with a litter box, food and water bowls, and a contraption of scratching posts, wasn’t enough for the cat according to Peterson. Mouse had still needed a name.

 

* * *

 

The hard part hadn’t been finding the target.

It was never getting rid of the target.

Steps one and two were easy clockwork that never failed.

It was the getting out clean that caused problems.

 

As if the first bullet had wedged inside the clock’s workings, making the next few steps almost impossible.

The target was taken care of, the proper, misleading, evidence in place. But getting out clean had never once been possible, not completely anyway.

Usually bullets could be avoided, but cuts and bruises were expected.

This time wasn’t the usual. Three bullets. One in his thigh, one in his shoulder, and one that grazed his ribcage but deflected from causing irreparable damage.

A broken window and a brief escape.

There was a girl. Four or five. Sucking her thumb in wide-eyed wonder. That fearless curiosity looking on at the blood with ignorance and surprise. The daughter.

He stared into her big brown eyes for a long moment that was free of time, her head cocked to one side. A gun cocked above it.

> He didn't see her once-white stuffed tiger hit the ground, but he heard the body drop.

Shouts were raised and bullets rained down.

Dragging himself along, he made it to the jungle’s gaping maw. Bullets continued to fly over his head, but once the guns ran out, the world fell silent. There would be no guards coming after him with bayonets or machetes, not here.

On the borderland, the area between the Wild and the _less_ wild, everything was quiet. The tamed lands fearing to disturb the spirits of the untamed.

Navigating wasn’t horribly impossible. The jungle itself left trails for the hapless masses of the forest. Knowing which ones to follow was a skill that came most often with well-practiced desperation.

Ancient temples littered the jungle.

Untold cultures, sects of long dead monks and warriors, had lived within the wilds of the Jungle. They had made a pact with it somehow, and their legacy had been preserved despite the vanishings of their cultures. The temples hadn’t been over-run by the jungles, and stumbling upon one had been no accident on the part of the wounded agent still high with the militant adrenaline of escape and success.

His blood smeared across the still polished floors. Dissipated within the cold water of the first large pool he found. It could have been a fountain or a cold bath or even the laundry for all he knew. But it was cold and wet and clean, numbing his wounds to the pain and flushing out the debris his escape had allowed to catch within them.

Then with the surgical precision of a reeling drunkard and haphazard results of the tormented Van Gogh, the bullets were fished out and left in the water. He shucked his clothes off, ridding himself of all the dead weight he could, before lugging himself out of the water.

> She was across the courtyard, simply standing in the sunlight. Looking towards him but not at him. She could have been a result of the stress and strain, but she wasn’t and he knew it instantly.

If he hadn’t gotten out before he lost consciousness, he would have drowned.

If he had gotten out any earlier, he wouldn’t have seen.

 

* * *

  


After the addition of the fourth feather and the cat, nothing changed for a very long time. At least it seemed that way to Jason. Dr. Peterson noted a series of landmark steps being passed in the agent’s recovery. Grocery shopping for one. Caring for Mouse had prompted that. A slackening in the rigors of exorcise, prompted also by Mouse, though mainly through accidental interference.

The SIG could now stay inside its closeted little room for nearly three days at a time before the need to make sure it still worked became unbearable. And it never came with him when he ran. Ten, twelve miles a day. Upped because the push-ups and sit-ups and martial arts forms were impeded by Mouse.

His iPod was still glued to his being. Not traded for the gun, but just as important a part of him. The iPod had been with him.

A different list of songs. All in his language, all an attempt to stay a bit connected to the outside.

These songs were in every other language on earth. Reaching out for the exotic, biting into the throbbing norm of reality. Searching for something.

> Another feather.

The breeze was strong as it blew the golden shaft along.

Reflexes, sharpened by past fears and present yearning, reacted. He snatched the feather from the air. Surprised and happy panting met his ears. “My Hero!”

He looked down sharply. The little girl didn’t notice as she leaned on her knees panting. She did notice his sharp tone as he demanded, “Is this yours?”

Bright blue eyes. No tears, but surprise.

Forcing himself to soften, he repeated the query. She brightened immediately. She shook her head in the vibrant way children do, her blonde hair spinning out and whipping back and forth across her face. Familiar.

“Nope, it’s my friend’s! She lost it!” Then leaning in on her tip-toes conspiratorially, the little girl continued, “She says it’s part of something precious!”

“Your friend?”

He searched the periphery of the park. Trying to think, to remember. The feathers meant something. Gold feathers.

“She’s over there!”

The little girl said, pointing. There was a girl, he couldn’t tell her age, with long pale legs in jean shorts. She was veiled in a dark green hoodie, pulled low over her eyes to keep out the early drizzle. The little girl waved. The other girl didn’t.

She was hunched over like someone had hit her. The little girl frowned. “She’s really shy,” she explained. “She comes to ballet with me!” Then she suddenly remembered herself and looked suspiciously at him, “But I don’t know who you are . . .”

He smiled. A little girl trained not to talk to strangers, it could never work. Innocence was too overwhelming. “I’m Jas— just Jae.”

The little girl continued to suspect him for a moment, before her bright smile regained its place. “I’m Becca!”

He kept his eyes on the girl at the end of the park.

“Can I have the feather? Please?”

“I think your friend doesn’t want it anymore,” he said, watching the girl shrink back into the mist until she had vanished from view.

The little girl turned around, confused. She pouted.

“But she said it was precious! _Precious!”_ she enunciated.

> Precious.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll be here tomorrow, same time. Tell your friend that if she wants the feather back, I’ll be here with it,” he said.

 

* * *

  


Five feathers.

Comment, but no question. Nothing explicit. Not yet.

They were becoming his obsession. But Peterson noted that he was doing miles better than the other agent deployed on a mission like his. The one other man, out of the five deployed, that had returned alive at all, was nearing clinical insanity. He was in a holding facility. Government run and supplied, babbling nonsense about the voices of the forest while doodling perfect concentric circles in the clean room where he was housed. If not supplied with material, he bit his thumb until he could paint the circles out.

Jason was perfectly sane.

The little girl in the park was not mentioned.

The little girl at the villa in the jungle was.

And the hallucinations.

After seeing the girl in the villa and leaving her to face whatever fate she came to meet, his dealings with her figure hadn’t ended. He saw her again. Many times. Dodging though the undergrowth ahead of him as he dragged himself along. Giggling on the edge of the pool he collapsed into. Playing with the bullets he’d dug out of himself like they were marbles. Her feet slapped down on the temple’s floors, waking him suddenly from even deep sleeps.

> _You fear to see her._

The little girl’s hair had been loose around her shoulders as she sucked her thumb at her father’s hidden villa. But in his hallucinations it had been braided.

> _You see her neither as she is, nor as she should be._

The little girl only wept once. Despite having lost her father and mother and older brother in one go. Having lost the safety of rank that gave her protection in the terrifying world of adults, she wept for him only once.

A week after having stumbled into the temple he saw a different girl. The girl from the dream of the first day. She was weeping, silent and standing. Her long hair, gold in the sunlight and liquid in the breeze, drifted in the stillness as tears streamed down the pale skin of her cheeks. He couldn’t see them specifically, but there was something apparently tragic about her despite her proud stance.  Her weeping was silent.

The little girl’s was not.

The little girl was on the other side of the temple, tucked away inside the dark maze of passages rather than out in the open courtyard, filled with sunlight.

He found her unwillingly, following his feet out of no cognitive command. She was huddled and shaking, her braid undone and her pretty red shawl pooling around her feet like the blood of her parents would have when she went to get a bedtime kiss.

> _This is how you fear she is, how you know she should be._

He couldn’t protest. He wasn’t aware if the thought was one introduced to his mind from an outside source, or a thought his own mind was trying to cast out and inadvertently giving form.

> _How she should be because of what you’ve done._

There was the muffled sound of sobbing as the little girl leaned into her knees, her dark hair cascading down around her shoulders in a frozen waterfall of grief.

Behind him echoed the distant sound of laughter. A tinkling giggle that was almost smothered by the sound of the wind slipping in clumsy play through the bells of the ancients. He looked behind him.

The other girl was there, off in the distance, again in streaming sunlight. She was still weeping. Looking back to his feet, he found that the little girl was still there. She looked up at him, not angry, not hurt, but not accepting or forgiving either.

She gave him a sudden toothy smile, punctuated by the small gaps of growing up. She giggled. She pulled her shawl up around her hair, fixing it in place with the elegant knotted twist of her people. She curled her toes and pounded her heels against the floor in childish excitement, bouncing around as she remained seated, more vibrant than if she had flown from her spot.

> _This is also how you fear she is, how she should be._

The little girl giggled again. _Rashana_. She leapt up at the echo of a name. She gave him another shy and girlish glance before skipping off to meet the girl in the sun.

That girl met his eyes, a fierce anger within their green depths.

> _How she should be as a little girl, how she would be if you hadn’t acted._

He looked on as the little girl met up with the girl in the sun. She hugged the pale girl’s white skirt, wiping the tears from her face in happenstance result. They left dark smears on the previously pristine skirt.

> _To fear seeing this. You are not like the others._

The sunlight girl took the little girl’s hand and turned her towards the courtyard. She wiped her own face with her hand, collecting the tears. These she rubbed into the cheeks of the little girl, as if they were the elegant face paint of a lady’s glamour. Then she wiped her sodden skirt along the edge of the little girl’s face, smudging the finishing touches into place.

The skirt in full pearl fell to its bearer’s knees.

A last look back at him.

The pair vanished into the glare of the sun, an echoing giggle bouncing through the halls for a long moment. His face was damp.

He went to the hall with the cold pool that he’d first collapsed into. It had been flooded back to its initial purity. The bullets were gone. He’d taken his clothes back when he’d regained consciousness, but everything that had been in his mission kit was arranged neatly beside the nylon container.

> Except for his gun.

 

* * *

  


He went to the park again.

The feather had already been attached to his necklace, fixed forever.

The girl did not appear before him.

> He needed to remember.

But what and why were unanswered.

The feathers, always the feathers. Why did that girl want them? Why did he want them? What did they mean?

The little girl, the one called Becca, did not appear either.

Her name was important. Mouse was important. Peterson too.

> His own name though.  .  .

He needed to find something. The feathers. Their meaning.

Why.

On the other side of the park was a dance school.

More than half-days, from eight to three. Excluding Wednesdays.

Else wise it was vacant. A library sound system. Built into the walls in a veiled mistrust that made the system open to access yet closed to capture.

Vacant of obvious life, but alive with potential.

Stepping inside, he felt the floor creak with a warm familiarity. A wooden floor. Old timbers worn smoothe with time and use and pride.

Pounding music. Steps once taught, now ingrained. Taught long ago. Taught _of_ long ago. A bell, light and high, and furious.

There she was. The girl with the hoodie and the long legs and the jean shorts. And the angry, angry eyes.

She had a feather.

It was tucked in her hair, made honey brown by the shade of her hoodie and the grey of the day. She stared at him with a laced malice that would have shaken a still air, the door pulled open just past the alerting bell. She looked up at the small figure, protesting to some offence its duty had made against her.

The feather fell from her hair.

It brushed the floor, ghosting with the silence of great importance.

“Why?”

He didn’t say anything else.

She didn’t look at him. She may have started to cry, or he may have imagined it in correlation to his own sudden sorrow. Or hers may have caused his.

She left.

He didn’t move for a long moment.

 

* * *

  


“How are you feeling?”

“Better.”

“Better how?”

“Just better.”

“Why?”

“The weather, maybe.”

Thunderstorms. Calm in the violence. A regression?

> Six feathers.

“You’re retiring this year.”

“Apparently.”

It had been at his request, but what had prompted the action he couldn’t remember.

It wasn’t the desperation of having just returned. If anything that would have made him eager to be sent out again. But he’d reached the contact point. Asked to meet the Director. Requested his retirement.

He was leaving with Honors.

He couldn’t remember which ones. He couldn’t remember why he’d asked for retirement at all. He couldn’t remember anything else about his emergence from the Jungle.

“Tell me more about the sunlight girl.”

The focus of these sessions had shifted. From raw regurgitation of events to this apparent self-attempt to process it. The jungle did that to people. Made them lose time and start to reorganize their own minds.

It usually drove them mad, all that time alone with themselves.

“She’s not the main character.”

These stories. Peterson was working with the other man as well, and these strange stories were the typical result of missions to the area in question. He didn’t understand them, why they were all the same.

“Main character?”

“The temple.”

> The temple had been the center of everything.

 

He’d stayed on the fringes for so long. A week, maybe longer. Recovering the use of his leg had been quick, but he didn’t leave to trek through the jungle when he was first able to. He stayed on the edges of the temple, always within sight of the exits, of sunlight.

‘What is it that they fear?’

‘Themselves, only themselves.’

The first voice was familiar, feminine.

The masculine one was laughing.

‘He will come, they all come.’

 

It was the masculine voice again, echoing out of one of the inner passageways. It was a corridor that led along to an internal courtyard. A bright grassy knoll that was surrounded on all sides by darkness.

 

The monkey was sitting on his staff, balanced by his long tail. His crown was too large for his head, and hung sloppily over one ear. His face was split in a wide grin.

“So you did come, I was beginning to wonder.”

“Who are you?”

“Bal.”

“No you’re not.”

The Monkey King clapped with his feet.

“I know you,” he said.

The Monkey King stuck his lower lip out. “No, you don’t. You know _of_ me.”

“I know you are not called Bal.”

“By others. What does it matter what they call me? I call myself Bal.”

Reaching up behind him, the Monkey King latched into a vine. He shifted. Stabbing his staff into a crevice in the Temple wall, he looped his tail around it and made himself a hammock. He continued to grin.

“And what do they call you?”

“Jason.”

“Ah, and what is your name?”

“ . . . Jason.”

The Monkey King cackled with laughter. It was a genuine, friendly sound. It was disconcerting. “How many names do you have, young one? Already so old, are you?”

He didn’t respond.

The Monkey King didn’t mind. He used his foot to adjust his crown and then gestured for the soldier to come closer. “Do you know what a name is? What makes a name different from a regular word?”

He didn’t say anything in response.

“All words were once names. Names for things, places, actions. They define things, give meaning,” the Monkey King went on. “I call myself Bal because it means something. You call yourself something too, but your name doesn’t mean anything. Who is Jason Tang? Hirozuka Jae? A piece of paper, a passport. A phantom at best, and only in certain places. What name got you here? How many names do you have?”

The Monkey King didn’t let him say anything. Rather, his attention was directed via the King’s extended foot to the other side of the courtyard. Through another dark tunnel, light could be seen at the end.

The sunlight girl, her dress was unmistakable even at a distance. Her long hair flowing in the pool of light at the end of the tunnel.

“When you can tell me her name, you will know your own,” the Monkey King said. He gestured at the arch way. Then he crossed his legs after pushing off the wall. Rocking in his self-made hammock, the Monkey King fell asleep.

Staring for a long moment, between the girl and the king, he plunged into the dark.

> The light on the other side was deafening.

 

* * *

 

Sunlight.

Cold and new and grey-gold.

An afternoon without rain, the first of the season.

The park was full of people, loud, oppressive.

He was edgy. Watching people, watching exits, watching for the enemy.

Foot to foot, light. A bouncing, tense jog, in endless circles.

Watching the people. Watching for her.

 

One minute the dance studio had been empty, the next she was there. No shoes. No hoodie. Both cast aside at the door. Just jean shorts and long white legs, a dirty T-shirt and a smoothe gold braid.

The pounding of music. A beat reached beyond the bounds of the glass. It didn’t quite match her movements. They were too fluid and full, expressive beyond the patterns of the song. Familiar, but unfocused. Raw and wrought with the pain of containment, loss.

She saw him.

Standing outside. She stopped, not frozen but still.

Her eyes were steady, a gaze that looked straight through to the heart. Piercing. Painful to look at, in pain that hurt to see.

His head spun, vision swirling to black. Darkness and green. A flashback. Rare for him, but not uncommon. A talisman of feathers, real and unreal. Here from there. A reason. The unknown made it worse, he couldn’t breathe.

One girl became another. The chain of feathers, an embrace.

He could almost remember. The sounds of people were washed away by the Jungle’s silent roar. A heady heat and humid high. A cold sweat of longing and shattered summer shade.

> A hand on glass. The window. The studio.
> 
> Deep breaths.

The girl was gone.

 

* * *

 

No shoes. Bare feet twirling atop old timber. A square of wood worn smooth with time, creaking and pliant, supple as if fresh.

She was dancing without music.

“I didn’t think you would come,” she said without looking at him.

> _Will you be able to find your way out?_

“Who are you?”

A spin. A smile.

“Wrong question.”

“What are you doing?”

“Wrong again.”

“Why?”

“Good.”

She stopped dancing and held out her hand. He stared at it and didn’t move. He moved his eyes to hers after the silence stretched. Green. The forest, Life-bringer, Law-giver; a world within her eyes.

“Why are you here?”

“A promise.”

Her voice was sad, distant.

“What promise?”

“ _When._ ”

“What?”

She let her hand fall and stepped lightly over to the far end of the wooden platform. Looking at something impossibly far away. “Protection. Preservation. Honor. From the beginning, forever.”

Stepping up to the smooth wooden planks, he asked again, “Who are you?”

“Wrong question.”

“Why?”

She turned back around to face him in a fluid spin that sent her long hair swirling in a cascade of sunlight. “I’m not the main character.”

“Then who is?”

“You’re frustrated,” she said, looking at him curiously. Looking through him critically. Unblinking green eyes.

“You won’t answer my questions.”

“You’re asking questions that won’t be answered.”

“Why?”

A smile. “They don’t need to be answered.”

“But I want to know.”

“You don’t.”

“Why?”

She stepped forward and placed one hand beside his cheek. Not touching, the space hummed with energy. “You’re afraid.”

Jason moved backwards, away from her energy, away from her words.

She held her hand out to him again, an invitation.

The sparkle of sunlight. “What is this place?”

She smiled, looking away again. So far away that time itself was spread thin at the board of her secret space. Her hand sagged a bit, the invitation holding, but the inviter resigned to refusal. “ _Who._ ”

The word echoed though Jason’s head.

He took her hand lightly.

The instant of contact brought a flood of light.

 

* * *

 

_Shambala._

The word had been repeated in a few of his sessions.

Dr. Peterson’s concerns were growing.

The shape of reality often changed in the jungle, in _that_ jungle. But the way Jason’s had changed was unusual. The other man with his senseless circles hadn’t changed at all, but Shambala was a word that he used often as well. Peterson feared an acute regression.

Particularly as Jason wanted to talk to him. Seth Michaels. A name he shouldn’t have known, but did. A man he should be like, but wasn’t. A meeting that shouldn’t happen.

To Jason the explanation was ridiculous. A meeting with insanity would never infect the sane. He wasn’t sure he _was_ sane, but he was sure that staying or becoming so depended on meeting Seth.

The name had been in his mind since he’d begun to remember. The mission. The alternative agents. Working separately; entirely separate, for no common cause. Their assignments were their own, their locations apart, their suffering the same.

The Jungle. And Shambala.

Names.

It was permitted that they meet.

Controlled, monitored.

Neither guaranteed not to kill the other.

The cold white walls and tables of a facility lunchroom. Plastic blue chairs, a strikingly artificial color. Steel trays. Mashed-potatoes, sliced turkey, gravy, all synthetic, all safe. The diet mirrored Jason’s self imposed regimen of box mac and cheese. The chemical compounds that made such artificiality possible were so separate from the jungle, a state to spite the fact that their roots lay in the shallow soil of it.

Seth wouldn’t look at any one of his handlers as he was brought in. Not unusual for him, for _them._ Even Jason avoided prolonged eye contact. Not for the penetration of knowing gazes, it wasn’t that through his eyes others could see his soul. It was that he could see theirs. He and Seth, both, could see into the flatness and the shadow smothered corners of the mind.

> Because they’d seen into hers.

Before, seeing what a person was thinking through their eyes was a natural, necessary way to form human connections. But after, after having had her stare inside and see not only what they were thinking, but what they had ever thought, after seeing into that vastness of brightly exposed, unconquerable complexities, the dry cavity of a normal mind was painful.

Peterson was with them as they were sat down. He on the end of the table with Jason and Seth on either side. Mediating. Recording.

Jason held himself steel still by the will of practice. Seth was not confined by such rigors and began eating as he trailed his fingers in circles on the table.

“Shambala.”

Peterson’s statement implied a hundred questions. He chose to ruin it by explaining, “Where is Shambala?”

“Wrong.”

Jason and Seth said it at the same time.

“Shambala is a place, isn’t it? Some sort of paradise?”

Neither responded.

After a long moment, Jason asked, “Do you know what makes a name different from regular words?”

This, the good Doctor knew the answer to; he was a psychologist after all, and the impact of linguistics on the human mind was a major part of his therapeutic field. “Names are specific, personal. They are what make a person feel alive.”

“Wrong.”

Seth had nearly interrupted Peterson to say it.

“Names,” Jason said, looking off into an unknown distance, towards the thing he couldn’t remember, “are what make something _be_ alive.”

“So Shambala?”

> “Shambala is the main character,” the pair said together.

At this they made eye contact with each other for the first time, and Jason realized something. It wasn’t just the perceptions he had of his eyes that had changed in the Jungle, his eyes themselves had changed. He had changed.

It was something about circles.

Jason moved his arm to reach the table, filled with the sudden undeniable _need_ to make his thoughts visible. The yearning to draw out the circles in his head was at least as strong as the need to deconstruct and rebuild his firearm, just as immediate. But in his motion to fulfill his desire, his arm brushed against the necklace of feathers around his neck.

He froze, feeling the tinkle of a great bell ring through his memory.

It wasn’t what the circles were that was important. It wasn’t even what they meant, regardless of what it was. It was what they were meant to remind him of.

The circles would exist eternally, a memory of some action beforehand, like the ripples on a glassy pool after a stone had been thrown in. Long after the stone has sunk to oblivion, the ripples remain; tangible proofs that the rock had been.

It was a metaphor for something.

 

> Something important.

 

_When you truly see yourself, the ‘you’ you were is gone. But the fact that another you existed at one time never ceases to be true, and the other you lives on in memory. Most people grow in snatches, glimpsing themselves behind curtains or from afar, and bury parts of themselves as they grow. But here, you have to see it all at once._

 

The bell, massive and tiny at once, tolled its tinkling note again.

 

> _I’m sorry._

 

Another bell.

 

A _clank,_ Jason had let his clunky steel fork fall onto his tray.

Peterson was alarmed. “Jason?”

Jason ignored him. He was still staring at Seth. Seth had stopped drawing circles.

“What was her name?”

Jason’s words were strained, as if there was some emotion choking him, though he felt nothing consciously. Except for fear, a mysterious frightened undercurrent of interest that made the question vital. “What _is_ her name?”

Seth didn’t answer; he was transfixed on the sight of the feathers. His hand reached out to touch them. Jason pulled back defensively.

“She’s mine.”

Nodding sadly, Seth sighed. “I lost her. I lost her in trying to find me. I lost me in trying to find her. She said it was possible, said _you_ were possible, but I never really thought she could be right.” His voice was slightly stunned and he was still looking at the feathers in a daze.

It was the most he had ever spoken at one time since his return from the jungle. Peterson was fascinated as much as he was completely lost. He didn’t even know where to begin to try to get the discussion back under his control. He’d been pushed to the sidelines utterly.

“She talked about you, Inoue,” Seth said.

The name rang in Jason’s ears.

“You were different.”

Jason’s hand wrapped firmly around the feathers and their chain.

“She said that it was possible to find one’s self by finding someone else, she said it was necessary,” Seth mused. “Find her, Inoue. By finding her you will find yourself, and by finding yourself, you can find her. Find her, and then find _me._ ”

At that Seth collapsed slowly, crumpling with the effort of remembering. Dr. Peterson caught him before he even hit the table. He could not catch Jason who collapsed soon after, the force of his own attempt to face the memories keeping him propped up even after he lost consciousness.

> _Find me, Hero._

 

* * *

 

The Temple was full of sunlight.

Constant, bright. Even if the golden glow fell short around tight corners, it was always there. Reflected by sleek brass mirrors. There was no such thing as night.

> Not in this part of the Temple.

He never really slept. It was in his training, short naps were the safest way to combat the external enemies, keen to attack, and the internal enemy of self-destructing exhaustion.

But in the temple he slept soundly, deeply. Warmed by the sun. Cradled by soft stone.

The only darkness came from pulling his hood over his head.

He woke with a start, pulling the fabric away sharply. His heart was racing, his pulse pounding through his ears and eyes in a disorienting swirl. His breathing was harsh and hollow. Quick in and outs of air to bring oxygen to starving muscles.

 

She had his gun.

 

She was examining it casually. He was calculating how to turn the tables.

The sunlight girl was still ephemeral in look, but in his mind she was suddenly a real person. Armed. Dangerous. She needed to be dealt with.

A threat. Nothing more.

She didn’t look at him as he was calculating, but just before he launched into action she cocked the gun and aimed it at him.

“You can’t win here.”

He didn’t answer.

She was sitting just more than an arm’s reach away. He could snatch away his gun if she was distracted for even a millisecond.

Looking at him with a smooth expression, she remained silent for a long moment.

Not at him. Towards him.

An unfocused, general gaze of interest.

She pulled the trigger.

The click of the hammer pounding against an empty chamber resounded in the courtyard. Echoing away long after the sound should have faded. She lowered the gun to her lap slowly.

“But you can’t lose here either.”

His heart had stopped at the moment he should have died.

He felt it.

He held his breath without collapsing in cardiac arrest.

One heart beat. One slow breath.

A long moment of stillness before another of both.

“Time is different here,” she said.

“It’s relative.”

He understood the figment of time. The physics that made it both a human creation and a genuine dimension.

She shook her head, the waves of gold cascading wildly about her shoulders.

“Not here.”

“Perception of it is.”

“Not here.”

Another heart beat.

“Then how?”

“It’s only that you’ve just noticed.”

He could feel the pattern now. It was very drawn out; too distantly connected to keep him alive, but definitely regular.

“How?”

He shouldn’t be able to stay conscious with his heart rate so distended.

“Time is different here.”

“Where is ‘here’?” He knew the general location. He could have pinpointed it exactly if he could see the stars.

She didn’t answer.

She went back to examining his gun.

“How do you have this?”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed it across the courtyard and cocked it again.

When she pulled the trigger a bullet fired. He flinched before the lead weight embedded itself into a new crack in the temple wall.

“You _need_ it. Why?”

“It’s necessary.”

“For what?”

“A promise.”

“What promise?”

He flinched as she shot at another of the temple walls and the bullet’s echo boomed in his head.

“A promise with myself.”

“For what?”

A third temple wall was shot.

This time he flinched quite violently, surprising himself.

“Something important.”

“Why?”

She turned the gun around to look at it again, eyeing down the barrel.

“I don’t know.”

At the moment he couldn’t remember anything about his old life, the life of a citizen that had led him to choosing an alternative. It was a suppression of memory that helped him survive the alternative.

“Yes, you do.”

Her eyes flicked up to meet his, to really look at him for the first time.

His head swam with the sudden sensation of looking into another person, a person whose eyes were completely open. Exposing her soul. Reflecting his. A deep and airy green that was intricately complex like nothing he had ever seen, utterly exposed.

When she pulled the trigger with the barrel pointed directly at her, he was already in mid-collapse as conscious failed him. Even so, he could hear that instead of the boom of a bullet, the click of a misfire echoed about the courtyard.

 

* * *

 

Jason woke with a start.

His breathing was constricted and his heart was racing.

He rolled over in bed, trying to resist the urge that made his toes curl and his fingers tangle in the starched white sheets. Breathe in. Breathe out.

> _You have to keep trying._

Peterson’s words, but not his voice.

The chain around Jason’s neck wasn’t cold against his skin. It clung to the contours of his chest like a pair of arms, comforting. Desperate to help and to be reassured in turn.

> _Please. Keep trying._

Jason’s nostrils flared in an effort to take in more oxygen.

He could only bear it for another few moments before he had to get up.

Fighting his way out of the pristine white sheets, he stumbled over to the little cupboard of a study that was locked away behind walls that weren’t glass.

He could stay away for over a week now, but he couldn’t make it to two.

On the table beside the space where he was deconstructing and reconstructing his weapon sat a small gold watch. It didn’t tell time and the glass face was marred with a crack. As Jason worked on his gun, his elbow occasionally tapped the frigid metal.

It was a watch from his old life, the one he’d had before he’d chosen to step out of that world; before he’d chosen to step out of the world altogether. Cold and sharp, it was a reminder. A date was carved into the cover across from the face, the date of the crack’s appearance.

When he’d managed to calm down, Jason placed the firearm down on the desk and picked up the watch. The chain attached to it had fallen off the table as he had been working and Mouse had been playing with it, batting at the golden feather that had gotten caught in it as the chain slid off the table.

> _We’re running out of time._

Jason ran his thumb over the watch’s face. The smoothe of the glass was interrupted by the slight ridge of the crack. His attention fixated on it as his eyes traveled about the small room he wanted to avoid.

There were notes and pictures taped to the walls. Arranged in a chaotic design, ordered by date and reasons that only made sense to him. Some of them were for missions. Some were from earlier. The camera that had taken them rested on the corner of the desk atop manila files; specs on his identities, missions, objectives, assets.

His chest tightened from looking at them, filling with a hatred that defied the feeling of the same sort invoked by the watch. Pitching the watch down by his gun, Jason began ripping the photographs off of the wall. When he had a handful he charged out of the room and tossed them over the railing, watching them fall down into the pool of water far below.

A few deep breaths.

He trudged down the stairs. Heavy on bare feet.

The water feature that snaked through the corners of his glass house had been a style element from the beginning. It was something he’d wanted to have included in the design from the very start. But now it was reminding him of much more recent events. He sat down on the side of the pool, watching the fresh water pour in as a flat cascade from the fountainhead. The current made the photographs twist and glide through the water.

> _Water doesn’t reflect life, it **causes** life. Where there is water, there will be life. And where there is life, there must be water. _

The voice was remembered this time, echoing through the thoughts that he couldn’t quite remember. If water caused life, what was it doing as the main feature inside the home of someone who so efficiently ended life?

> _A choice. One life for many others._

He couldn’t remember if it had been something he had said, or something he had been told. And he couldn’t remember when or why.

> _But you remember what. The what is important. It can help you find the why. You can find it, you have to. If you keep trying, you can. But you have to keep trying._

One of the photographs caught his eye. It was a simple enough picture. There was a girl with short hair as red as her scarf walking down the wharf on the far end of town. She was just another girl in the crowd. It was her eyes that were unusual.

They weren’t the flat expanses leading into nothingness like those of everyone else he’d seen since he’d gotten back from the Jungle. At the same time, they weren’t as clear or complicated as his. Or Seth’s.

They weren’t like hers.

But they were closer.

He had captured a moment of transition. The girl had decided something, made a choice. She’d become a slightly different person than she had been only moments earlier, and he had captured it on film.

> _You have to remember who you are, and who you were. For your own sake, you have to remember. Before you no longer can._

He lifted the photograph out of the water and stared past it in his hand, trying to force the fuzzy scene in his head to come into focus.

It was pointless.

There was nothing he could do, sitting here like this, that would help him remember.

He made a decision. He had to find her. She would know.

The girl with the long white legs and the gold braid and the feathers.

By finding her, he could figure this out.

> He had to remember.

He had to find her.

 

* * *

  


Jason walked into the government building more than an hour before he needed to.

It wasn’t typical behavior for anyone, let alone an agent that had only recently been pushed past what his psyche could take from the sudden implosion of suppressed memories. And for this particular operative, such was even more unusual.

He had his gun.

It went directly against recommended protocol.

He marched downstairs to the firing range.

Perfect aim, dead center every time.

A second round of shooting, cutting the piece of paper that served as a target in half.

The third round was aimed to slice the paper the other way, but flashes of half remembered scenes flashed through his head. Every shot missed the paper entirely.

 

With the barrel and the clip having been completely emptied, Jason disassembled the machine to clean it. Instead of the burning desire to make sure it worked, he was distracted by marveling that it worked at all. He marveled at what it was for.

The killings it created in the world, created a world that had fewer killings.

“You’re early.”

“I was bored.”

Peterson was beside him now. He’d come downstairs the moment Jason’s presence had been reported to him, but until now he’d only watched.

“I’m free right now.”

Jason nodded and followed Peterson up to his office.

“Cigarette?”

The offer was accepted and instead of moving to sit immediately on the couch, Jason stood and looked around as Peterson fished in his pockets for his lighter.

The office had two walls full of books. The wall with the couch was plain save for a large painting. The fourth was behind Peterson’s desk, a brickwork seat and wide window.

Jason took his cigarette, freshly lit, over to the window. He looked out as he took a long drag. He set his gun down beside him and slid onto the seat, ignoring the papers that Peterson had laid out on the oversize sill.

Breathing out, a puff of smoke that snaked like a dragon through the still office air. Its figure was highlighted by the sunlight. It was a dull and grey light compared to what he almost remembered. What he had to remember.

“How are you feeling today?”

“Tired.”

“You’ve been through a lot lately.”

“I want to talk to him again.”

“You know I can’t let you.”

“I know you will eventually.”

“Right now it’s not a possibility.”

“It will be.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Jason took another long drag, blowing out slowly to watch the wisps of smoke ride the air as Peterson asked, “How?”

> “Why.”

 

* * *

 

Right on schedule, she was there again.

In the ballet studio that wasn’t.

Dancing to music, but not that which was playing.

> This time he was careful.

He didn’t stare at her directly, and he didn’t hesitate.

He came inside and sat in front of the door.

> Blocking her in. Blocking everything else out.

She retreated to the furthest corner from him.

He didn’t move. He’d been watching her for over a week, regularly tailing her as she went from the studio through town before managing to slip away in the crowds. He hadn’t directly approached her in this time; but, as if he was cultivating an asset, he’d ensured that he’d been seen as someone involved in the same sectors of the world as she.

This time he would make her talk.

“Who are you?”

He spoke softly, his voice forced away from making demands and into a tone the sounded merely curious. She didn’t respond, and wouldn’t have no matter how he had sounded as he’d asked. She curled up into a tight ball in the corner and stared at him.

Stared past him.

She was looking in his direction with cloudy green eyes that could see just enough to know that they were blind. It was a wall between her and the world, a wall she wanted to break through but couldn’t.

“Who are you?”

Jason couldn’t tell if she was asking the question or merely echoing him. He chose to answer assuming the first option was correct. “I don’t know.”

She stared at him in the silence between them, the music of the studio continuing to pound in the quiet. It was a softer and quicker beat than the pulse of the Jungle, but it was the same in how it made the hushed pause between their words all the louder and more solid. “Who are you?”

“I don’t know.”

The repetition seemed to give both, the question and the answer, a ring of finality; as if the universe had given a sigh at the confirmation and admittance of a Truth.

“I do.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you.”

“How?”

“You told me.”

“When?”

“Where.”

 

* * *

  


He woke up slowly.

Long deep breathes. Hands stretched up above his head, fingers twined.

Calm.

He didn’t have his gun.

A tightness in his chest, but no real panic.

The soporific temple was too thick with seeping warmth and sunlight.

Sitting up, he stretched and looked over towards the cold pool of water he clung to for orientation in the Temple. But he wasn’t there anymore.

He’d left that room; followed her.

The low pool of water in the corner was not the one he knew, but somehow it was just the same.

> Except she was there.

Sitting on the edge of the pool in a shaft of yellow light, she was looking through the things he’d piled in the shade.

“What is your name?”

He knew better than to ask who she was.

“I don’t really have one.”

“You have to have one.”

“Why?”

“You have to call yourself something.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

She smiled in his direction, but kept her eyes on the trinkets of his mission pack. “Do you know what makes a name special? What makes it different from regular words?”

“Names are personal.”

She nodded. “They’re chosen. The first choice made by anything alive is what it wants to be called. People and animals, even plants and places. They choose their name, what they will respond to when called, and what they won’t. It doesn’t matter what others call them, what they call themselves is their name.” She looked off into the distance suddenly, her bright green eyes focused intently on some point only she could see. “Names are what makes something, anything, _be_ alive.”

“What is yours?”

“I don’t have one.”

“But you’re alive.”

“Not really.”

“You’re here.”

“I exist.”

“And you think and talk and live and breathe.”

She didn’t answer.

Her hand went to his mission pack, slowly lifting up the pocket watch tucked away there. The chain, grey, sturdy, cold, slipped from her hand, swinging in the sunlight.

“What is this?”

“It’s a pocket watch.”

She didn’t respond. But she carefully lifted the end of the chain and pooled it in her hand. She examined the free end closely and then clipped it to the base of the chain. Curious.

“It’s a necklace,” he amended.

She peered intently at the smooth face of the watch, running her thumb over the uninterrupted glass. There was meaning laced within it. How he had brought it with him, here, was something she didn’t understand.

“Whose?”

“Mira’s.”

> The name was heavy in his throat, thick and strangling.

The quiet sound of nails tapping against stone echoed through the courtyard. She was drumming her fingers.

But the sound was behind him too, not just an echo.

A cold nose pressed into his back, snuffling at the exposed skin under the edge of his shirt. Familiar. Kai.

A half remembered scene flitted through his mind as the sunlight girl lifted her eyes to look at him. The little orange puppy that had been a Christmas present. The little girl with long black hair it had been for. Inoue Mira. And the Shiba Inu, Kai.

“You love her.”

“She was my sister.”

“Is.”

“She died.”

“She’s still your sister.”

“She’s still dead.”

“Not to you.”

She looked back to the watch, holding her thumb over the crack as she examined the etching on the inside of the cover. “Why do you have this?”

“It’s a reminder.”

“You don’t want to remember.”

“I have to.”

“But it hurts to remember.”

“It has to.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s my fault.”

“Inoue Hirozuka.”

He didn’t answer. The name did not belong to him anymore. He’d been called that long ago, by parents and people. Something like friends. That person had died with his sister.

> “ _She_ called you her Hero.”

 

* * *

  


“Tell me more about the sunlight girl.”

“She’s not the main character.”

“But she’s important.”

Jason had been coming in to his sessions with Peterson willingly.

His mood was much improved, and he seemed much more like a human than the dangerous animal that merely looked human he had been when he’d emerged from the jungle. It had been a week since he’d asked to see Seth again. He hadn’t asked to see him since, but he had asked about him.

“He saw her too.”

“But he can’t tell me anything about her.”

“He never saw anything worth telling.”

“But you did.”

“No.”

“But what is she?”

He sighed, looking off into the distance past Peterson’s shoulder. “A promise.”

“About what?”

“When.”

“It is something to do with the temple?”

“No. It’s everything to do with the Temple.”

Peterson was fascinated. No one under his care had ever been able to gain enough cognition to talk about the sunlight girl. Not like this. She was a figment of the imagination that was as universal and solid as Time. Though debriefing Jason, helping him recover, was Peterson’s main priority, his sunlight girl called to Peterson’s innate curiosities.

“What did she tell you?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Why?”

“It hurts.”

“How?”

“Nostalgia.”

> Greek. The pain of an old wound.

A literal translation not tempered by time or change.

“What pain?”

“Which.”

Plural. Peterson struggled to make the leaps in logic that Jason needed him to.

“Old memories? Are there many?”

“Not memories.”

“Then what?”

“Do you know what a memory is?”

“No.” Peterson thought he knew. He had read the scientific literature and the philosophic theories that described memories. He knew that they were isolated captures of past realities locked within conditioned patterns of electrical charge within the brain. But he also knew that Jason would disagree.

And he didn’t know what Jason would counter with.

“Exactly.”

 

* * *

  


The girl in the studio had a feather tucked into her braid, as golden as her hair.

He’d only seen it when she’d fainted. The braid had curled over her back as she slumped into sleep as her consciousness gave up on trying to remember.

They hadn’t spoken since she had tried to think about who he was.

She knew. He knew she did, and so did she. But she couldn’t remember.

It was hours later that he’d given her a piggy back ride to his house.

To his home.

The glass building in the woods that was real and unreal at once.

He left her in his bed, taking the feather to his little dark room to attach to his necklace. Eight feathers. He wouldn’t be able to find many more.

> He was running out of time.

 

* * *

  


“Why are you here?”

The sunlight girl was talking with him again.

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you come?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you come to the Temple?”

“I needed to.”

“But why?”

“The mission.”

“What was it for?”

“A promise.”

She was looking at him now. Trying to understand. Her eyes flicked over his figure without meeting his. The green inside her eyes was light and dark at once, complicated, open. Revealing.

When she did make contact with his eyes he could see everything she was, but he couldn’t understand. When she looked into his eyes, she could see everything he was; she could understand it, him. She knew his every thought, intent. She could see his reasons, but she couldn’t see why he had them. He couldn’t see anything but her, and her reflection of him; and he couldn’t understand it at all.

“Why are you here?”

His question implied several.

He was beginning to understand this part of the Temple, but only enough to know that he would never understand it entirely.

“To help you.”

“Why?”

“Because you can understand, you have to.”

“Why?”

“Where are we?”

“The Temple.”

“Shambala.”

“What is Shambala?”

“Who.”

“Why?”

“The Jungle and the Temple are as alive as you.”

“But you’re not?”

“Not really.”

“And Shambala is?”

“Yes.”

 

* * *

 

“Those feathers, where do you keep finding them?”

“Around.”

“Do you look for them?”

“Not really.”

“Would you, if you knew where they would be?”

“Yes.”

 

* * *

 

“You’re not the only one in the Temple.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s another man.”

“The Monkey King?”

“No. Bal is the Jungle’s voice. He’s not a man. Not like you.”

“So who…?”

“I don’t know, yet.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s lost; on the other side of the Temple.”

“Where? Can I get to him?”

She looked off into the distance sadly for a long pause of heartbeats before she asked, “Why do you want to?”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?”

Meeting with another operative was against protocol, but he wanted to figure this place out. Another person could mean answers, or at least someone to get another opinion from. He needed a clue. Something. Anything.

“Do you know how to get back to the Temple?”

“I’m in the Temple now.” He said it definitively, but something in her voice made him question it internally.

“You are.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“Because I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No,” she said, almost sadly. “I am the Temple.”

“What?”

“Bal is the Jungle’s voice. I am the Temple’s.”

“You said you were a promise.”

“I am.” She was sitting across from him, the clear blue water of the fountain between them. It felt like an ocean. She trailed her fingers through the chilly liquid as she said, “I’m the Temple’s promise.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What is your promise?”

“Protecting something important.”

“What?”

He paused, thinking about this was not what he wanted to do, but he couldn’t stop himself. The memories of the day he’d made the promise that changed everything came flooding through him. He couldn’t stop them; the sounds, flashes of what happened, the overwhelming feelings . . . it all came rushing back.

> And then he was looking directly into her bright green eyes.

In slow and painful procession, his jumbled memories arranged themselves and marched in an orderly timeline through the day he lost his sister. It was his fault, he hadn’t even thought to consider the dangers his quick series of promotions through the military’s strategic management of international liaisons division might hold for his little family. His parents had died when he was still a teenager; it was a hard loss that had made the bond between himself and his baby sister all the stronger. He’d promised to protect her as any good big brother would.

> Mira had called him her Hero.

He helped her with homework and stress and life lessons.

But what made him a hero to Mira was that he helped others too. His military job made it so that he was directly responsible for a significant number of policies that permitted the peaceful relations of many of the world’s most powerful countries. His job was a major impediment to the international criminal organizations that had been running things _their_ way between countries.

 

* * *

  


“You’re not like the others.”

He didn’t answer.

The sunlight girl almost never left him now.

She left him to his thoughts, but she never left him alone.

Her questions came at random in the form of statements that made him ask telling questions. What they told her, he wasn’t sure.

It was an old interrogation trick, very old. So old that it had been around long before any such thing as interrogation procedure had been formalized.

Developed out of ancient catechism; twisting things to make the questioner’s position of power feeble, and the didactic accounts of the responder compelling beyond mere prompt. Questions can but flounder in the face of Absolute Truth.

He’d grown suspicious of her briefly.

She could have been an agent, somehow trying to wrench information from him.

But she could have just killed him and been more effective with less effort. He didn’t know anything of value. He knew his mission and that was all.

And he was almost as interested in trying to figure out what she wanted as she was in figuring out what he was.

His response was assumed, obvious.

He only had to look at her to show he was willing to play along.

> _What do you mean?_

“You’re different,” she said. “You remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Who you are outside of it.”

“It? The temple?” _No._ He corrected, “The mission.”

“You don’t think you remember; you try not to, but you do.”

“Always.”

“You promised her. It’s why you can have the necklace here.” She was sitting on the edge of the pool, looking at him with her chin on her knees. Her hair fell in curtain over arms and the gap between her legs and her chest. “And why you can have the gun.”

“The others?”

She’d mentioned them before, but never in any concrete way. He didn’t know if they were there with him somewhere hidden in the temple, or if they’d been here long ago. It could have been either from the way she spoke of them.

“When they’re here, they remember,” she said softly, looking past him to the very edge of time. “But they’d forgotten before; they have to remember here and that’s why it hurts. They can’t bring anything with them. They can’t bring anything with them that isn’t a part of them, no one can.”

“What about my mission kit? I have that, don’t I?”

“It can’t be brought here.” She lowered one foot into the vivified blue of the pool, the essence of life that been spilt out among the foliage to coalesce in the shallow depression of time-warmed masonry. “It’s in the temple, but it can’t be brought _here_. Only you can come here. And yet you brought things.”

“I didn’t bring the necklace.”

“You didn’t bring the gun, either,” she said simply, dipping her other foot into the blue. The water played about her knees as she watched it, kicking her feet about gently under the surface. “Not in your hand, anyway.”

 

* * *

  


“Seth Michaels wants to see you.”

Jason smiled.

“Why?”

“He says he remembered something.”

“And he won’t tell you what it is.”

“He says only you would understand.”

“He's probably right.”

“Probably?”

There had been so many absolutes in these sessions, Dr. Peterson was surprised to have heard something so flimsy from Jason as a ‘probably’.

“Depends on what he’s remembered.”

“Will it be about the sunlight girl?”

“I don’t think so.”

“If it is?”

“Then wouldn’t she be able to understand it, too?”

“You say that like she’s real.”

Outside, in the narrow streets of the city, it began to rain.

“You say that like she’s not.”

 

* * *

  


The first day that Jason had the girl upstairs, he’d locked the door from the outside with a little latch he’d installed out of a moment of paranoia years ago.

The second day he’d unlocked it.

She didn’t even notice.

She hadn’t even tried to open the door.

When she woke up, she simply sat up in his bed. After looking around for a long while, she’d noticed the tray of food he’d set out for her on the desk.

She’d gotten up and picked at it, just enough to make sure that the empty feeling that made her want to double over wasn’t from hunger. Then she went back to the bed and curled up again.

She didn’t wake up until Jason came back the second day with another bowl of cereal, and another muffin. This time he had toast and orange juice and eggs and bacon, too.

From the bed she watched as he came in and set the tray down. They stared at each other for a long moment. And then he left.

Initially, he’d locked the door again. But he’d felt her eyes on him as he’d headed down the stairs and within the hour he’d been back to undo what he hadn’t even meant to do. She was not a thing to be kept, but she was not a person to be let to leave.

 

* * *

  


It was a snow globe that almost reminded him.

Sitting on Peterson’s desk for over a decade, it had been a kitschy little thing from his honeymoon, and one day during Jason’s time in the office filled with papers, pictures, gadgets, _things_ , it had slipped from its perch and fallen to the thickly carpeted floor.

Music tinkled out of it as Peterson admirably restrained a string of curses, picking it off the floor. It was undamaged save for a palm tree that had been jarred from its lazy swoop and had fallen behind the lawn chairs.

The movement of the fake snow paired with the high bings of the music’s notes caught Jason’s attention slowly, and released it far slower. It was suddenly the most interesting and engaging thing in the world, and Jason could only stare at it as Peterson droned on about the backstory.

The music ached behind Jason’s thoughts, reverberating between his split strands of concentration. His hand went to his pocket to finger at the seam, and this mind drifted back to a far off sunny spot and a long dark arch of stonework that kept things out, and kept things in. A long tunnel with a bright spot at the end, the tiny echoes of bells leading the way.

It was only after the good doctor had finished, with several seconds of silence enforcing that he was in fact done, that Jason turned away from the snow globe, shaking his head and trying to refocus on the situation at hand.

“I want you to talk to him,” Peterson said at last. “I want you to talk, and I want to see if Seth Michaels will tell me any more about the sunlight girl than you have.”

“He can’t, _we_ can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re frustrated and won’t listen to what we’re saying.”

“I’m listening, I’ve been listening,” Peterson retorted softly. “It’s my job, and my desire, to listen to you; to help you. Both of you.”

“You listen objectively to help us, but to understand her you have to listen to the _story_ ,” Jason said. He didn’t understand her either, but he knew more than Peterson, and he knew enough about her to know that even though Peterson hadn’t been in that Jungle for a second of his life, he was just as infected by her as those who had spent years there.

He was just as obsessed with her as Seth or Jason, but he had even less to cling to about her than they did, to prove that she was real. And it made him all the more desperate to do so.

 

* * *

 

  
“This place . . . is it even real?”

It was Jason’s first question in a long while.

He was laying in the shade on the side of the pool. He wasn’t sure she was still there; the occasional hushed splash could have been any number of things.

When she answered, her voice was soft and very close to his ear.

“What makes something real?”

He didn’t flinch at her sudden proximity as he would have were it any other context, any other person.

“I don’t know.”

The dehydration, disorientation, the panic of a mission. None of that felt real any more, none of the memories he couldn’t find felt intangible. Everything he’d grown used to knowing as True felt like vapors, distracting mists. The things he’d been trying to forget felt as thick and solid and tangible as they had when he’d decided that he couldn’t bear to hold on to them anymore.

“You sister was religious, wasn’t she? But you’re not.”

“Her God was real to her, more real than anything.”

“But not to you,” she said with a smile deep in her throat. “And you understand it. That ‘real’ is whatever you want it to be.”

“Why? Why isn’t there a standard to define things by? Real or not real? At the very least, _real_ should be something solid, something . . .”

“That is a very good question.”

“Why are good questions the ones that don’t get answered?”

His voice was a mix of bitterness and chagrin at the irony.

Hers was entirely amused.

“Because the good questions mean more without answers than any answer ever could.  And because if you _could_ answer the good questions, why would anyone bother to _try_ answering them? Why would we bother to grow?”

He smiled.

“You said ‘we’.”

 

* * *

  


“Where is it?”

The same cafeteria. The same steal and plastic. The same illusion of modern distance from the past and roots of the Jungle.

Seth and Jason and Peterson.

Guards and cameras.

Just talking.

Peterson had tried to steer the discussion, but he was ignored. Seth had answers the doctor wanted, that Jason needed.

But Seth also had a question.

“Where’s the music box?”

“Her music box.”

Jason’s hand went to his pocket. The change from his coffee shop breakfast was there and jingled a bit. Coins clinking together like the light sounds of the water and bells and life in the Temple.

_She was humming as she waked through the shallow water, the melodic drip of the fountain head accompanying her. The bells began to toll, light ringing sounds that echoed deep within his chest._

> _I want to show you something._

Jason couldn’t see straight. His vision had narrowed to a long black tunnel with a tiny pinprick of a bright doorway so far away he couldn’t tell what shape it was. It was a place he’d been long ago, and a place he’d never really left.

But he couldn’t put the pieces of the memory together properly.

The smoothly curved edges of one piece refused to match up with the rashly torn lines of another.

> _Don’t be nervous, I just want to show you something unimportant, something interesting._

“I know you can find her, Hero.”

Seth’s voice. “She needs you to. _I_ need you to find her.”

“What do you mean? You need him to? What are you looking for?”

> _I’m supposed to show everyone, but I **want** to show you. _

“What did you do with the box I brought back?”

“We returned all of your things.”

“No, you didn’t. You gave me back everything I’d left here before leaving,” Jason said, pretending that he wasn’t dizzy and that the world around him wasn’t muted. “I’m talking about the things I brought back.”

“The feathers?”

“My mission kit.”

“By now it would usually have been restocked; but since you’re retiring it’ll probably be presented to you at the ceremony.”

“Get it for me sooner.”

Jason’s vision began to focus; he slipped from the tunnel, still lost on the wrong side of it. The images around him sharpened to an almost unbearable degree. The whiteness of his fist-bound knuckles throbbed in his periphery, the bleaching of blood-loss keying in flashes of a different paleness.

> _I want to show you Me._

Seth was looking at him with his eyes fully focused on a prize he couldn’t see, blindly reaching out for what he could almost imagine he remembered. His distant reality lingered, closer to him than Jason’s, and yet too far to touch.

“Get it for me _now_.”

 

* * *

  


When the girl first woke up in his bed, Jason was there to see her.

She didn’t stretch, or wake with a start.

Her eyes simply fluttered open as he walked in with a tray of food.

She stared at him with unblinking green eyes as he crossed the room to the desk in silence. Pausing, he stared at her. His eyes were trying to bore holes in the mists engulfing hers, something to make her see.

She didn’t speak as he left the room.

She didn’t get out of bed, and she didn’t react when he came back.

The food remained uneaten.

By the third morning, Jason was genuinely worried.

He brought another tray of food and sat at the desk until she woke up.

“Eat.”

She slipped from the covers, standing slowly but perfectly steady and stable. Long pale legs and short blue jeans, a long torso with a white tank that never seemed to rumple, and that long gold braid hanging down her back; every detail was so precise and familiar, even the steadiness of her movement, smooth motions as if compiled captures of still frames. Her hand stretched out for her fingertips to feel the cool wall of glass where the sun was beginning to melt in. She leaned in, pressing her cheek against the smooth surface.

“It’s warm.”

 

* * *

  


“You have a guest?”

Jason nodded. He hadn’t really meant to tell Peterson about her, not yet.

But he was the only person Jason thought could help.

“She won’t eat.”

“Who is she?”

“A friend.”

“You haven’t talked about her before.”

“She’s mine, just mine.”

“I’m here to help you, Jason. You shouldn’t keep things from me.”

“You shouldn’t keep things from me.”

“The music box?”

Jason’s expression confirmed Peterson’s guess. “I’m working on it, but this is a bureaucracy and these things take time.”

Jason was silent. Peterson looked him over carefully. The soon-to-be-retired agent still had every ounce of muscle his missions and training had given him. His chiseled features were bare of luxury’s soft baby fat.  His eyes were as dark as ever and his expressions were muted, if even present.

“Tell me more about your friend.”

“She won’t eat.”

“Anything?”

“If I feed it to her directly, she’ll chew and swallow. But unless I feed her, she won’t eat what I bring her,” Jason explained.

“How long has this been going on?”

“A week.”

“Have you tried talking to her?”

“She says she’s not hungry.”

Peterson was silent for a moment. “This is a fairly serious issue. Are you sure you’re stable enough to have a guest like this?”

“I’m fine.”

“How often do you check your gun?”

“I haven’t since I brought her home with me.”

“When was that?”

“A week ago.”

“Did something happen to her? Something traumatic?”

“She won’t talk about it if it did.”

“Do you think something did?”

“Yes.”

“Why has she started staying with you?”

“She needs to.”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

“Why you?”

“She doesn’t really have anyone else.”

Peterson was curious about Jason’s connection to the girl. He’d never once talked about her in all of their sessions for all of his missions. But he was a doctor too, and he was worried about her health, and about what having one mentally unstable person care for another might to do them both.

“Could she have been raped? Or sexually assaulted?”

“I don’t think so, she lets me feed her.”

“And other than that she’s been taking care of herself?”

“Yes. And she likes Mouse. She sleeps with him now.”

“Where?”

“On the floor.”

 

* * *

  


The slate was always warm when he woke up; a soft heat rising from underneath, as if something large and warm-blooded had been sleeping on the other side of it. The temple’s hidden dragon breathed a deep sigh in the mornings, waking the rest of the life concealed within the jungle while refusing itself to be more than stirred.

She was there.

> She was always there now.

When he woke up she would be there, lying on her stomach with her arms crossed and her chin resting on the smooth gold plate of her cuffs and bangles.

Just watching him.

Her bright green eyes alive with interest.

Rolling over, he put himself in a mirror position to her. His eyes traced the line of her hair, hanging down in wisps to brush the designs etched into her bracelets.

“What do they mean?”

“Do they have to mean something?”

“Not really, but why wouldn’t they mean something?”

She smiled.

“Everything means something, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t have a reason to,” she said rolling over to lift her bracelets up above her. “These exist because I do.”

“Why?”

“They’re spells, magic. They keep me here.”

“Like a genie in a bottle?”

“They keep me safe. The Jungle is dangerous, but so is the Temple. These symbols mark the promise between the Temple, the People, and Jungle. With the people gone, I’m the only thing left to uphold their end of the deal, the Promise.”

“What’s the promise exactly?”

“You tell me yours.”

“Why?”

“Why aren’t you angry? Or scared? Or anything else that the others have been?”

Jason sat up and hung his elbows on his knees with his back to her. He stared into the time worn stones of the temple floor. “What does that mean?”

“Why aren’t you hungry?”

 

* * *

  


The small gold and ivory box fit neatly in his hand and he was rolling it over carefully in his palm. It was such a unique object . . . so particular. Jason was surprised he’d forgotten about it.

The music box was delicately crafted, but with the lines of a robust design. Tiny gold legs set the ivory body a fraction of an inch off the ground. The body’s pot belly curved out elegantly, with an etched detailing of tiny designs that looked like scales without a magnifier; curved up to meet the top, fastened on securely by the gold hinges of an intricate dragon figure. The minute gold creature’s tail and hind claws served as the hinges and the fore-paws curved protectively around a tiny keyhole as a decorative and secure latch.

> The key had been lost.

Perhaps never found to begin with, Peterson had tried everything to retrieve it to no avail. It was not with Jason’s other things, only a ninth gold feather had been found with the music box, and the key it had replaced could not be easily forged. Nor could the tiny tumblers be successfully picked apart by any tool, they were far too minute and delicate to survive such proddings.

Jason couldn’t remember the tune. It hummed in his head, just out of reach, like a song on the radio you couldn’t quite name. It was a frustrating certainty of knowing and being unable to recall.

His fingertips brushed over the uneven surfaces of the music box as he leaned back on the couch in Peterson’s office.

“Seth Michaels said it was her music box. He meant the sunlight girl, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you have it?”

_Bal smiled mischievously and he folded Hero’s hand around the solid shape. I’m giving her to you, you know. As much as she can be anyone’s, she’s yours. What you do with that power is up to you, now. I only have one more little test for you._

“I found it.”

“How?”

_The Monkey King’s tail was wrapped firmly around Hero’s shoulders, one of his feet holding the human’s chin steady, forcing them to look eye to eye. This is her body, and you already have her name._

“She told me how to.”

_Now all you have to do is unlock her mind._

 

* * *

  


The bells were the oldest things in the Temple.

Far older than the Temple itself, older even than the springs which had been funneled into the masonry over the centuries to purify and sustain it.

They hummed with the latent energy of the ages as he watched her weave among their dozens, hanging at their various heights from ancient vine ropes that could have still been very much alive.

She’d led him into another new room in the temple.

A sudden smile, a quick electrifying hand grab and a _come with me_ , and she’d pulled him through a shadowy archway into a room mostly closed off from the Jungle. The roots of great trees had managed to punch through the stonework, slim strands of sunlight streaming in with them. It had taken his eyes a long moment to get used to the relative darkness.

She hadn’t waited for him.

As soon as they’d entered the room she’d dropped his hand and walked on without him, to where she was now. Her hands hovered over the curves of the bells as if she were feeling the heat rise off the skin of a great beast she had long ago befriended.

> “Come and see them.”

He stepped forward with caution, wary of both his the shades eluding his unadjusted eyes, and of what exactly it was that he was to come and see.

The moment he was within reach, his hand went to imitate hers.

The humming sensation of the bells compounded, the very air quivered before their immense experience. And then they began to toll.

It was her doing. She was tapping lightly on the massive bronze shells, coaxing the latent animals into stirring.

The tolling notes were impossibly soft and high for bells of this size and gauge, but at the same time, he couldn’t imagine any other, more theoretically appropriate, sounds being issued from the sides of such old and withered beings.

The wind chimes of their voices bounced around like the laughter of small children, amplified for the simple sake of another voice falling into the fray. Other spurts of giggles caught in his ear, laced within her soft smiles.

A small hand grabbed his.

The girl from the house in the Jungle. _Rashana._

And on his other side a slightly larger hand, equally filled with lost potential. _Mira_.

He led the two little girls deeper into the maze of bells as he followed the sunlight girl on her seemingly innocent stroll. Behind him he heard the whispers of his parents, the haunting last sighs of his targets, the soft commendations of his compatriots.

They went on walking like this for a while.

He gathered eventually that the bells were hung in a vaguely circular pattern and that she was slowly spiraling more and more inward as she towed him along with the sudden and insignificant notes of a voice raised to match the tolling of the bells.

“They’re all a part of you, a small part of the basic drives that lead you to continue to be,” she said, somehow managing not to break her song as she explained. “They make up the reasons you have for existing.”

She led him on, keeping an inward trajectory, even as she held out on the periphery of the arrangement of bells.

“About what you were asking before,” he started. After a pause of an immeasurable space, he went on, “Why is it that I’m not hungry?” He’d been in the temple for so long, and he hadn’t even thought of food once since he’d set foot on the time worn stones. It went against his training to neglect his provisions like that, and it went against his logic to accept that he hadn’t needed any of them.

“You’re asking with the right words, but not the right meaning.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re body isn’t hungry because it doesn’t require nourishment yet.”

“Then what were you asking?”

She paused, letting him catch up to her without turning around. When she did face him, her expression was as smooth as always, but he could detect an intense curiosity and confusion radiating from her.

Kneeling down to take the hands of the two little girls, she pulled them to her in a tight hug for a moment before releasing them to look up at him. “You don’t want anything from them, from any of it,” she said. “They exist as a part of you, and you’ve accepted that. You aren’t trying to apologize to any of them, you aren’t angry at any of them, and you don’t want to ask them anything. They just are, and they are a part of you.”

“I wouldn’t be who I am if they weren’t.”

“And you know that.”

“Mira told me not to regret anything,” he supplied.

“Most people go crazy when they see what they are, it frightens them to think that they are merely an assimilation of the things they’ve done and the people they’ve encountered,” she explained. “They lose themselves.”

Standing up abruptly, she walked directly to the center of the arrangement of bells. He followed, watching as she stepped into a shallow pool of water at the focal point of the bells’ pattern. From far above the slow pouring of cool water kept the pool full as light waves splashed over the side.

She was humming as she waked through the shallow water, the melodic drip of the fountain head accompanying her. The bells began to toll again, light ringing sounds that echoed deep within his chest. It was only once they’d started again that he noticed they had stopped while she’d been talking.

“I want to show you something.”

He stepped closer with caution stretched over his ever muscle fiber.

“Don’t be nervous, I just want to show you something unimportant, something interesting,” she soothed. “Something that you won’t remember.”

Curious he released the hand of the girl that wasn’t his sister and reached out for the hand he watched her extend invitingly.

“I’m supposed to show everybody, but I want to show you.”

“What is it?”

She held out her other hand, asking for the one still clinging to the figure of his little sister. He didn’t take the offer, though she let her hand remain outstretched.

“I want to show you Me.”

 

* * *

  


She still wasn’t eating on her own.

She seemed to look forward to when he would come and feed her.

It had been three weeks and she was now up and about rather often.

She still slept on the floor in his room. After he’d gotten her out of his bed that once, she’d never gone back. Instead she slept on the floor with Mouse, and now she followed the cat downstairs in the mornings to his breakfast. Then she simply followed the sun as she explored the rest of the house.

Moving from sunny spot to sunny spot, stretching out for a nap every now and then, she was more cat-like than Mouse.

He would watch her, as she stepped into the black marble water feature, as her fingers dragged along the glass railing of the staircase, as she slid silently from room to room with carefully placed steps. He would watch her encounter everything as foreign. And he would watch her find something familiar in the way the sunlight slanted across the slate floor and disappeared into the dim stacks of his bookcases.  
“Why won’t you eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

He held up a piece of toast for her to bite, and she lept at the opportunity. She let the taste slide over her tongue slowly, lingeringly, before she swallowed.

“But you are.”

“I shouldn’t be.”

 

* * *

  
“Are you alright taking care of her?”

“It’s fine.”

“You should think about letting me talk to her.”

“You won’t be able to help.”

“Why not? I’m a professional.”

“She won’t trust you,” Jason paused a moment, adding, “And you won’t trust her.”

“Why would that be?”

“You can’t trust someone when they tell you they’re lying.”

“Is she lying to you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you trust her?”

“Completely.”

“Why?”

> _I’m lying._

“Because.”

“Come on, Jason. You know better than that, you have to tell me what you’re thinking,” Peterson chided softly.

Jason smiled.

> _The tolling of the bells was so quiet; he thought he could be imagining that they were sounding at all. It could easily have been true. She was humming over their murmur. It wasn’t a melody, merely a loose linking of unrelated tones strung together by her slow breaths._

“Tell me, Jason.”

> _She wouldn’t let him only hold one of her hands, not this time. She was patient and could wait, would make him wait. He gave his sister’s hand a squeeze and let go. He didn’t see Mira walk away to join hands with Rashana before leaving the forest of bells altogether, but he felt her leave his side as the tolling of the bells settled further into silence._
> 
> _Her humming was quiet, but as the loudest sound in the Temple it was nearly deafening. He placed his other hand in hers with a cautious precision of movement that made her smile. You have to trust me._

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

> _He nodded._
> 
> _He did trust her. The realization didn’t surprise him, but the lack of surprise did. It wasn’t in his nature or his training to trust._

“I’m thinking about the first time she lied to me.”

 

Peterson nodded, coaxing Jason to continue. It wasn’t easy for any agent to explain his thoughts, especially when he didn’t even understand them himself. This was a step that Peterson was imposing on Jason on account of the pace of his progress. He was a rare case; very rare indeed.

It was unlikely, but possible, that he would be able to remember; to remember and explain some things about the sunlight girl that Peterson had been trying to understand for the better part of his career.

 

_Her eyes met his and stayed there, boring through him._

_It didn’t hurt anymore, not like it had before. It wasn’t overwhelming either. She was staring into him, and he was staring back._

_She pulled him into the small circle of water at the center of the bells, the noisy center of silence. The cool waves of his transgression lapped at his ankles as she let go of his hands and placed hers on either side of his face._

_Hold Still._

_She stretched up and kissed him firmly, causing his eyes to close and his whole body to hum with the energy of hers._

> “What did she tell you?”

_I’m lying._

> “She said to believe her when she said who she was.”
> 
> “What do you mean?”

_The cleverest of simple beasts, alas must die._

> “She said she wasn’t real.”

_For is not its every word a necessary lie?_

 

* * *

  


Opening his eyes, he found that she’d stepped further than just away.

She’d vanished into the folds of the silence around him, vanished into the mists of history contained in the bells. The pool at his feet was nearly drained as he stepped out, from having two occupants push its cache out of bounds and away, with only the slow drips from above to replace it.

He took a few deep breaths steadying himself against the sudden weight of the stillness around him as he carefully slipped out of the circular forest of the bells. The weight stayed with him, grounding and comfortable even as the adjustment to carrying it came slowly on his unsteady feet.

He walked back through the temple as he had been led. He paused in each room, wondering at how long it had been since he’d last been in each, and marveling at how short a time it really was.

> _You see things as you are, not as they are._

The greenery of the Temple suddenly struck him. There was so much life contained in the ancient stone work. The abandoned home of a long forsaken culture bred the uprising of a more robust culture, an enduring push of reclamation and compromise.

> _That you see things does not mean they are._

A small hole in the wall caught his eye as he passed. A niche carved out by the lethal lead of a bullet. It had been some time since she’d shot his gun, causing the cracks that a new spurt of green had pressed itself into. The utilization of that very instrument of death by life was something he was familiar with, but this was a new visualization of it for him.

> _And that you don’t does not mean they are not._

He continued to walk, backtracking through the long passages of dimness that had once seemed so dark. He was moving towards the growing light of morning; the haunting hum of predawn moved with him as he traveled, mourning the loss of night’s hush. The light songs of birds began to catch in his ears and the rustle of the temple’s hidden beasts prickled at the still hairs on the back of his neck.

> _Whether or not a thing is acknowledged, it exists. It’s the case for all things, a Truth of sorts that in and of itself is a lie._

The courtyard he’d first wandered into, his very first venture into the deeper realms of the Temple was quiet. The stirrings he’d been hearing were suddenly muted, slowed and pushed away as if the very fact that the disturbance they made on the stillness was an effect at all was being denied.

> _There are such things as truths in this world. Those illusions which have been forgotten to be illusions are what we see as true. The entire universe is a fractured echo, infinitely warped and replayed, of some original Truth._

Looking around, he found that he was alone. There was no one in the courtyard with him, and moving to sit in the very center of the warm stone floor, he sat down to wait.

> _That doesn’t make any of the illusions we’ve made into truths less true. It makes them more so; it makes them personal. To share a world, to share even a portion of one, is to experience both a personal truth, and something like the original Truth at once. And it’s only possible because of the misleading echoes individually made into universal truths._

Laughter behind him alerted him to the Monkey King’s presence.

> _We exist because we choose to be._

“Welcome back, I knew you would be one of the few to find their way out on their own,” Bal said as he stood up. The Monkey King was strung up in a hammock of himself, his staff and tail looped around to make himself a comfortable perch. “It’s time for you to leave now, and I don’t need to tell you how to get back.”

> _We are because we’ve been chosen to exist._

“You have to tell me one more thing.”

Bal cackled with amusement. “Clever little human.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t need anything,” Bal replied. “Because you want something.”

The Monkey King slipped from his hammock, balancing his form on this staff and beckoning the human forward. When he was within reach, Bal’s hand slipped quickly into Hero’s pocket, snatching out the treasure she had stowed there.

The tiny music box glittered in the sunlight.

> _Bal smiled mischievously and folded Hero’s hand around the solid shape. I’m giving her to you, you know. As much as she can be anyone’s, she’s yours. What you do with that power is up to you, now. I only have one more little test for you._

Nodding gravely, he slid the music box into his pocket, feeling its weight and presence slip into him. She’d told him everything he needed to know.

> _The Monkey King’s tail was wrapped firmly around Hero’s shoulders, one of his feet holding the human’s chin steady, forcing them to look eye to eye. This is her body, and you already have her name._

Within even the darkest of human lives, there is a little bit of light, of Life.

> _Now all you have to do is unlock her mind._

 

* * *

  


Seth Michaels had requested another meeting.

He wanted to see it, the music box he remembered.

He’d improved beyond all clinical hope and permission was granted.

This time things were different. They were in the small park behind the hospital, the open area designated for patients to have access to fresh air.

They were sitting on a bench looking into the ripples of the small fountain.

Jason and Seth, with Peterson standing on beside them.

The music box had been passed into Seth’s hands, they weren’t quite shaking as they held it gently, but now and then the tremble made itself visible.

“She is so beautiful, isn’t she?”

Jason was silent.

“I’m not going to be able to see her again, am I?”

Jason still did not reply.

“I can hear her song though, I remember it.”

“She doesn’t.”

Seth sighed. “And neither do you.”

“I don’t. I know it, but I don’t remember.”

“You don’t know it, you don’t remember... But you know her name, so you will.”

“You know her name too.”

“But I won’t remember it; I’ll never remember it.”

“No.”

“And you won’t tell me.”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you about my song, because you won’t remember.”

“I’ll find my own.”

“But I want to tell you mine.”

“Tell me.”

Peterson looked on, lost and fascinated. He wasn’t mediating this conversation. He wasn’t even recording it. He was too absorbed in trying to understand it, too caught up in knowing that he never could.

 

* * *

  


“Tell me more about the sunlight girl.”

“She’s not the main character.”

“But she is a character.”

“She exists.”

“What’s her name?”

> _When you can tell me her name, you will know your own._

“If there is darkness, there must be light. If there is light, there must be shadow.”

“A riddle?”

“Truth.”

“About the Temple.”

“Good.”

“Shambala is the Temple’s name.”

“And hers is of the light.”

> _Shambala. This place is alive. It’s the darkness that is, not within you, but that which is you. Shambala is not the temple, it is the Temple’s name._

“And what is her name?”

Jason was still for a long moment.

“You want to meet her.”

“Can I?”

“She still won’t eat.”

 

* * *

  


It was impossible.

The house-guest of his patient couldn’t be the girl from the Jungle.

It had to be some sort of subconscious projection.

For, certainly, an eternally repeated dream would be taken to be reality.

She’d been too much a part of Jason’s time in the Jungle, too much a focus of Peterson’s during their sessions to have been anything else.

> Peterson blamed himself.

He’d been pushing Jason too hard in regards to her, his own curiosities bleeding into his professional attempts to help Jason recover.

When Jason opened the door for Peterson, the doctor stepped inside ready to deal with whatever his carelessness had done to the poor soldier he was supposed to have been helping. The ridiculous belief he had instilled in Jason that the sunlight girl was real may have set his treatment back a year in terms of progress.

“She’s upstairs.”

Jason closed the door behind Peterson and went back to the chair he’d been lounging in with a book. He ignored Peterson altogether as he gave Mouse a pat on the head and reopened his book, instantly intent on the pages.

Peterson slipped his coat off and set his briefcase down before going up the stairs to confront the girl, the construct of the Jungle that been imposed on an innocent. Or may have not existed at all. But even skepticism contains belief, the belief in Logic.

Jason finished his book before Doctor James Peterson made his way downstairs, having seen nothing, talked to no one, and developed a terrible headache. The beginnings of evening were still a long way off, but he felt as though he had been stationary and mentally active for a very long time.

His coat was slipped on, his briefcase was picked up. Jason didn’t say anything.

“Don’t be late for our session tomorrow.”

Adjusting himself, Peterson opened the door to leave, but he hesitated.

Turning back to his patient for a moment, he sighed heavily and collected himself. “Before I go, Hero,” he said inquisitively, “Her name, what is it?”

Smiling, the retired agent returned, “You wouldn’t remember if I told you.”

> _Kirana._

 

* * *

  


In the subjective reality of life, every word has a slightly different meaning to every individual. The Forms from which the countless metaphors derive exist merely because we want them to and are no less real for the fact we’ve made them up.

> What it means to be real is no more important than what it means to be.
> 
> To be is not simply to exist.
> 
> It is to affect.

 

* * *

 

He woke up slowly.

Long deep breathes. Hands stretched up above his head, fingers twined.

Calm.

The weight of another person, the warmth of her beside him; the pale hand on his chest. He kept his eyes closed in the warmth of the sun, sliding a hand down her back, fingers brushing through the long strands that had been released from the constraint of a braid. She didn’t stir consciously under his light touch, but she relaxed into him, seeping into his being with the warmth of the sun and her own body.

He fell asleep again with her in his arms.

Perfectly content and comfortable.

 

He was asleep when she woke up.

He was asleep when she went downstairs and made herself breakfast.

He was asleep when she came back to his side and kissed him.

 

It was the hungry, passionate kiss of surrendering to latent cravings.

 

> _I’m off for now. Don’t forget me while I’m gone, okay? You can manage without me for a little while. You’re my big strong Hero, and you can do anything._

 

When he woke up and stretched his muscles out, feeling the soreness of his long years of training and pushing himself coming back at last to haunt him, she was gone.

When he walked downstairs, heavy on bare feet, to make himself breakfast, the kitchen was not quite pristine.

> On the counter was the music box.

Beside it was a single gold feather.

Beneath the tenth and final feather was a tiny key, too small to fit anything but what it was made for.

Setting water on the stove to boil for tea, he gingerly lifted the key.

He slid the key into the slot on the music box and turned it gently.

The latches clicked open and the lid lifted to release the disconnected melody that had become so familiar to him. It was a melody that could be remembered when you weren’t thinking about it, a song that could only be hummed without a sound.

> That something is real is a matter of decision.
> 
> That a memory is alive and just as real as anything else is a matter of trust.
> 
> That any given lie or truth is part of the Universal Truth is a matter of faith.

  
  


_Fiat_ _Veritas . . . Fiat Mendacium . . . Perat Mundus . . ._

_Fiat Veritus . . ._

_Fiat Mendacium . . ._

_Viviat Mundus._

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is another fic first written as part of a school assignment... because that's just how I roll.
> 
> Over years of edits and such, it's drifted away from both it's original fanfic-ness and from it's school assignment-ness, but I still like it and I thought it was worth sharing while I'm still working on the BatFam series. ^_^


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